


The Castaways (and the unspoken promise)

by sybilius



Series: The Seabirds [3]
Category: The Sea-Wolf - Jack London
Genre: Canon Divergence, Fluff, Multi, Polyamory, Shipwrecks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29870190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/pseuds/sybilius
Summary: Wolf Larsen washes up aboard Endeavor Island with Maud and Hump. The circumstances drive them closer together.
Relationships: Wolf Larsen/Humphrey van Weyden/Maud Brewster
Series: The Seabirds [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2196096
Kudos: 2





	The Castaways (and the unspoken promise)

**Author's Note:**

> Again, a continuation from the last fic, Maud's characterization carrying throughout. :)

What came to his eyes first was grey.

Not white, blinding light, nor the hell-fire he was told to expect, lived his life daring it to smite him. Shimmering greys and shifting warmth, beneath him, and above him, stroking gently on his brow. He waited, eyes half-open, for the fevered coal of life to kindle in him, that yeasty froth that demanded to be sated on what it laid eyes on. 

He did not open his eyes. And from within, nothing came. Nothing but the strange peace of that rhythmic touch, from work-roughened hands he well should know. 

His eyes flash open, “Hump.”

A soft gasp, “So you are alive.”

Wolf Larsen sits up, hard and sudden, brightness overwhelming him, followed by a wave of dizziness he most often felt with those damnable headaches. He was on a beach, a lonely, rocky thing, with Humphrey van Weyden beside him. He blinked in disbelief. Indeed, it was his very same victim, lover, first-mate, all and less than he ever should have meant for him. Surely, this could not have been hell, shared with Humphrey van Weyden! With all his moral fortitude, and all the temptations of evil he had avoided even on the demonic ship that the  _ Ghost _ was -- that Wolf Larsen had indeed made it so. 

“I-- I was so terrified to have lost you. I might have had better faith,” there is a brokenness, a wine-glass crystal despair that brings Wolf Larsen sharply to reality. He coughs several times, spitting out salt water with gobs of what could be blood. He is alive. They both are. So the froth lies upon them. 

“Miss Brewster--” he begins, hardly able to stop the coughs once they’ve begun. Hump puts one hand on his back almost tenderly, and the terror Hump spoke of suddenly has him by the throat. Of all damnable ends, or beginnings. 

“Oh, no need to worry on my account!" that delightful, tireless woman pops up from behind a cave, gesturing with a piece of driftwood. Hump laughs, a bell-like sound fervid with joy, and the fear within is replaced with that swelling emotion which so often threatened to pull him under. 

Not a storm, but rather-- the ocean itself. So the storm, the sky, the  _ Ghost _ , himself -- all but a small part of the fathomless sea of love that against all odds, had come to surround him. He wavers slightly, Hump catching him by the arm. 

“You gave Humphrey quite a scare,” Maud joins them on the rocky shore. The outline of a primitive shelter winks in the shrouded sunlight behind her. Wolf Larsen has to remind himself not to gape.

“Hmm,” he licks his lips, his voice coming out hoarse with salt, “Here I never imagined you would move for survival so competently, with your lack of experience.”

“You taught us well,” Hump states, ever ready with a soft word. Maud cough-laughs, her sodden dress fanning out as she sits beside him.

“You were a terrible teacher,” Maud states honestly, fixing Wolf Larsen with a gaze intense and searing as a gulp of ship’s whiskey. He feels Hump tense beside him, as if waiting for violence, and an uneasy shiver of discomfort goes through him. To think he was so indifferent to being a force of fear prior to that. Relished it, even. 

“Perhaps.”

“Time was, I’d have been afraid to say it in quite that way,” Hump laughs nervously.

“We have Miss Brewster to thank for that,” Wolf Larsen replies gravely, “You took great personal risk, in speaking to me that day. I’m grateful for it.”

She snorts, a noise not befitting a woman of femininity alone -- and yet she possessed that, and more, grace in her every movement. Wolf Larsen feels the same stirring in his chest that he first remembers when Hump shared his bed -- he could curse right then, if he was not in their company! One of them was more than enough. Hump himself seems similarly spellbound, and blinks and shifts away all too suddenly from his captain with a cough. 

Suddenly, all the entanglements tighten between them, like wind whipping through the sails at just the wrong moment. Will the ropes, none carefully lain, string them up like a hangman? He ought to speak first, find the words to push them both away, and the bile and cruelty rises to his lips so easily -- 

\-- but of course, it’s Miss Brewster herself, already shaking her head at the both of them. 

“Don’t hold yourself back on my account -- Humphrey, I could see from the moment I met you, the kind of spell he had on you -- “

Hump blushes furiously, “But you -- I thought we -- all right.”

“Many things could have been, but are not,” she says. Simple and blunt, brushing a bit of sand off her dress. Not even a bright eye, the tears and maudlin wailing that was purported by her sex, but simply practicality. Better, perhaps, than many men. 

Perhaps Wolf Larsen ought not to judge women on hearsay. 

But never mind that, she’s still not quite made the right decision.   


“You’re so determined to leave us, then,” Wolf Larsen finds his voice at last, and what comes out is a pleasing rumble, the same that made Maud Brewster flush in his presence aboard The  _ Ghost _ . 

In fact, it seems to have a similar effect. She coughs, looking away, “ I trust you’ll help me survive, of course, but broadly, what purpose would I serve, getting between you --”

“Perhaps between us is where you belong.”

“Mr. Larsen!” Hump gasps, equal parts scandalized 

“I do believe we should be on a first name basis now, Mr. van Weyden,” he replies gravely.

“Your name is really...Wolf, then?” he says it quietly, almost meekly.

“My given name is Wolfgang. I chose the name Wolf for myself,” he says, managing to keep himself steady. It’s been a long time since he gave anyone that name. 

“Wolfgang,” Hump repeats with wonder. 

“You know I’ve never liked the sound of it till I heard it on your lips,” he fixes Hump with a glance of what he hopes is intensity. From the way his lover’s lips part, a small exhale of pleasure, the slightest movement towards him -- he has more than succeeded. 

“You see, I’d be a fool to part the both of you,” Maud stands up, all practicality, and goes to collect another log to throw on the fire. Wolf Larsen has to wonder if she chopped them herself. He searches what little reading he has done, what Hump read to him, to find the right words to explain to her. In the end what he comes out with is honesty. 

“He who earns my respect, earns my love. She who earns my respect, becomes my master.”

This seems to give her pause. She squats back down, not quite sitting. Still across from both of them, with her delicate form that has Hump in such thrall. Wolf Larsen is drawn by her eyes, which have the same fire in them he remembers by the lantern-light. 

"Women, men," she muses, staring at the glowing coals, “Are we really so different, separated by such technicalities of the flesh.”

“Not so. But I suppose, I will take your orders as to what should happen next.”

“An invitation to give orders, from Captain Larsen himself?” Maud hums to herself, evidently pleased. The quirk of her lips sends a shiver through Wolf Larsen’s body, “I shall have to think on it. In the meantime, could Captain Larsen kindly provide us with something resembling a dinner catch?”


End file.
